BUMPS IN THE ROAD

Throughout our infertility, there have been many bumps in the road - above and beyond the typical ups and downs from the monthly disappointment of negative pregnancy tests.

We spent countless hours on the phone with my insurance company for appointments and services charged wrong. With referrals over to Mayo, oftentimes it would get mixed up and I’d get charged “out of network.” And then trying to figure out medications. Many of the infertility drugs are “specialty drugs” and aren’t available in many areas, so they have to be ordered from specific pharmacies that were covered under my insurance. That equaled a lot of time on the phone with pharmacies, clinics, and the insurance company!

Along with figuring out where to get the medications shipped from, more than once they arrived frozen to our house as our IVF was in the dead of winter in Minnesota. This proved to be difficult as oftentimes you’d receive the medication just as you needed it very last minute, since you didn’t know if you would need it and it was too expensive to just have on hand “in case.” Then we’d have to hustle to try to get another delivered on time, without being frozen and unusable!

Then there were painful procedures that weren’t supposed to be, such as my first IUI that went horribly wrong. Not to mention the crazy acupuncture experience I had! There were also times that I had cysts in my ovaries from the strong medications, therefore our treatments would get pushed back in order to allow time for the cysts to disappear.

One time I was even told to take the wrong dose of medication. But it didn’t seem right to me, so I called the clinic to check and I was correct. It’s important to be on top of what you’re putting into your body and understanding what it is and what dosage it should be. Trust the doctors and nurses, but trust yourself too!!

Another stressful experience was finding out the cost of IVF was going up in 2010, right as we were doing our IVF. We were fearful that we’d have to pay the large 20-some-percent increase (thousands of dollars) since ours would be done in January, just a few weeks after the new year. After weeks of calling, emailing, etc – we finally find out that we’d still be charged the 2009 rate. Wow! I could have done without that stress!!

All of these bumps in the road were things we weren’t expecting, but as if we had ever expected to experience infertility in the first place. So, you just deal with it, move on, and keeping looking ahead. Nothing is perfect…I know! But I try to think that all of these experiences just strengthened us and made us even more appreciate for our future children!